Posted
by
Zonk
on Sunday February 27, 2005 @05:15PM
from the power-to-the-people dept.

An anonymous reader writes "DailyKos is reporting that a group of senators and representatives including Hillary Clinton, John Kerrry, and Tubbs Jones, have proposed an 'open-source' voting bill. This bill (The Count Every Vote Act of 2005) corrects many of the problems in the last election. Notably, it requires paper receipts, and that the source and object code of all electronic voting machines to be open and readable by the public. " Commentary on the bill available at the Miami Herald.

Is it just me, or do all politics lately revolve around this same theme?

Corporate lobbies push for proprietary voting machines, the public interest is for open-source voting machines.Corporate lobbies want extensions to patent laws, public interest is to reasonably limit patent protections.Corpate lobbies want to DRM everything with legal enforcement, public interest is to have fair use.

The more explanations I hear as to why corporate lobbying is a necessary evil, the more convinced I become of how much of a negative influence they are having on our society.

Thats why campaign contributions should only be able to be made by those legally able to vote. That would eliminate corporate donations, and if some CEO wanted to put up their own money, it would be more visible. While this doesn't address lobbying in particular, it is a start.

The best solution would be more Congressional accountability, but that is not so easy to achieve.

> Thats why campaign contributions should only be able to be made by those legally able to vote.

I second that! If you look at why the concept of the corporation was invented anyway it was primarily because it eased the beurocratic overhead of making sure all the investors received their investment returns and could collectively manage a project.
I would argue, with modern tools, one could set up a system with independent contractors (think Ebay) that could achieve the same effectiveness without the fo

What's that about the First Ammendment? Giving someone money isn't speech. If it was then I could "speak" to the police office with a couple of bucks to get out of a ticket. Money != Speech.

Similarly, the 14th Ammendment (intended to guarantee the right to vote for blacks (freed slaves) and poor whites) does not say that corporations are citizens. If corps are citizens then they should be allowed a vote (under section 1), and be counted in the census for the purposes of assigning representatives (sect

What's that about the First Ammendment? Giving someone money isn't speech.

But campaign finance regulations, if they work, work specifically by obstructing political speech. The goal may be to keep corporations from buying influence, but when you do that by having the government make decisions about which organisations can and cannot freely pay to make their ideas widely heard, you do run into First Amendment concerns.

The right to free speech would mean nothing if it meant a right to speak freely only

The problem isn't contributions; it's that it costs so damn much to run a serious campaign and candidates have to spend 12 hours a day raising money instead of being out campaigning. Why does it cost so much? TV ads!

How about we do one better any just eliminate political ads on our public airwaves. Try as I might, I just can't see any benefit to political commercials. They are full of mudslinging and sound bites that certainly leave the viewer less informed rather then more informed.

If we could cut the official campaigning down to less then 6 months, but during that time focus on debates and real discussion of issues we would have both better informed voters and cut the cost of the election down by huge amounts.

How about we do one better any just eliminate political ads on our public airwaves. Try as I might, I just can't see any benefit to political commercials. They are full of mudslinging and sound bites that certainly leave the viewer less informed rather then more informed.

From a First Amendment standpoint, banning political ads will never happen. Political speech is what the Founding Fathers had in mind when the Bill of Rights was drafted and these ads are, for better or worse, political speech.

Mudslinging is as old as politics, and it's not going away any time soon. There's a peculiar paradox in the US: voters tell pollsters that they abhor negative campaigning, yet negative campaigning wins elections every time. A politician that refrains from going negative when his opponent does so is a politician that's looking for work in the private sector come November.

I liked what Bill Clinton said when he was promoting his biography on the Daily Show: It's not "going negative" when you're responding to an opponent's attack. Clinton loved it when his opponents went negative because it gave him an opportunity to counterpunch and while looking squeaky clean. Of course a politician who refrains from going negative when his opponent does so is going to lose, he's just letting himself get beat up. No voter likes a wuss. The trick is just defending yourself in the right w

Bush & Co. outspent Kerry by more than $40 million dollars. It took me 60 seconds to verify this.

Of course you're neglecting all of the 527 organization [opensecrets.org] spending, which was skewed VASTLY in the opposite direction... The top 5 spenders in that category were all democrat/liberal/progressive, and they alone spent almost as much as each of the two campaigns did. Overall 527 spending was about 80/20 in the favor of the liberal/progressive camp, and that spending dwarfed the 'official' campaign contributions.

Bush outspent Kerry by $40 million dollars.
True.
Look at this chart. Out of the top 10 527 advocacy groups (listed by spending) 8/10 are Democratic groups.
If you go by numbers, here's how the top 15 Advocacy groups line up.
Democratic Aligned
$333,000,000 (333 mil)
Republican Aligned
$90,000,000 (90 mil)
That's only the top 15.
So who outspent who? The Democratic groups clearly outspent the Republican groups.
Let me make a point. The Swift Boat Vets are the 7th largest advocacy group in 2004.

OK but as I understand it the democrats had more campaign funding(George Soros, etc.) than the republicans, and they still lost!

You're looking at it all wrong. This isn't a Democrat vs Republican thing; this is a Big Business vs Individual thing.

Both the Democrats and Republicans are very pro big business, because that's where they get their money. If they weren't both chasing after corporate funding, maybe they would do a better job of representing their constituents.

"but they won't do that cause compromising means dealing with the ignorant unwashed masses."

Actually, we won't compromise because we have principles and moral values.

Example: Gay people deserve rights the same as any other citizen. I'm unwilling to compromise. If that's out of tune with the rest society - oh well. Being an abolitionist was out of tune with society at one point, too.

As a liberal (who tends to vote Democratic Party), I vote based on what I believe is right - not on what I believe is the

Actually I dont recall the constitution laying out groups as a protected class that inherit the rights of their members.

Only actual individuals have rights, any other artificial conglomerate has privileges that we as the people grant upon them, and can revoke at will, if they are not living up to the responsibilities of those privileges.

Claiming a group inherits the 'rights' of the individuals is not only folly but dangerous. You would have to explain why a group doesn't have the 'right' to bear arms, for instance. If a group inherits the 'right' of freedom of speech, it logically follows that it can exercise all the right granted to its member individuals.

So please ponder the consequences of your assertion, and I hope you can still sleep at night.

Seems illogical that I have a right to political speech, but my wife and I do not.

I agree, the construct 'group' doesn't exist in the Constitution as far as I know. But then again, the Supreme Court has been able to find non-existing language in the Constitution before, so it may very well be introduced by judicial fiat.

Since a 'group' is nothing more than several individuals it seems logical that the NRA and George Soros should have equal rights to political speech.

Seems illogical that I have a right to political speech, but my wife and I do not.

Nice try. You have a right to political speech. Your wife has a right to political speech. However, when you start to collectively exert that influence, special restriction may have to come into force so that the collective power of your combined speech, along with the individual speech you can still both engage in, does not overwhelm that of other, opposed, individuals who do not collectively pool their resources.

I agree, the construct 'group' doesn't exist in the Constitution as far as I know. But then again, the Supreme Court has been able to find non-existing language in the Constitution before, so it may very well be introduced by judicial fiat.

When it comes to constitutional rights, language doesn't need to exist in order for a right to be protected. Bill of Rights, 9th Amd basically says "Just because we didn't choose to write it down here does not mean the right does not exist". Strict Constructionists seem to always forget the 1st and 9th Amendments, but then the Loose Interpretationists always ignore the 2nd and the 10th....

Wrong. Try actually reading the Constitution.
It says, "An organized militia being necessary..., the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms shall not..."
Its right there in black and white.

Not wrong. Read the Federalist Papers. The specific wording was a compromise between two specific enumerations. When they decided to come up with the Bill of Rights, everyone had a laundry list of their specific concerns that they wanted addressed. Hamilton et al were concerned with keeping it simple. They tried to make each amendment as terse as possible. On the issue of militias, certain convention reps were concerned that the feds would claim the sole right to run the military, while others were concerned with the individual right to keep and bear arms. The 2nd is worded to address the concerns of both. The first part (re: the militia) was to guarantee that local militias would be permitted, and the second part to guarantee that the power of revolution remained in the hands of the people. The US Code clearly defines the militia, and it's basically everyone who's not in the regular military, the reserves, or the national guard; so don't bother arguing along that tack.

And of course that was written back when you had a war your soldiers brought their own guns.

In a civil war, the combatants still do bring their own guns. The purpose of an armed citizenry is to guarantee that the government rules only at the sufferance of the populus. Self defense against invasion and lawlessness is another purpose, but really the lesser of them. Remember, the founding fathers had just won a war of independence, throwing off the yoke of a tyrranical government. They wanted their posterity to be able to do the same.

In any event, the fact that we are having this argument means it is anything but "unequivocal".

Actually, it doesn't. All it means is that one side is unwilling to accept the inarguable definition of "militia" according to the US Code and the unambiguous purpose of the wording as explained by Alexander Hamilton himself in the Federalist papers. Arguing against unequivocal points doesn't make the points equivocal-- it just makes you wrong.

Or how about the right to vote? If groups inherit the rights of their members, then they can cast a vote, right? Dems and republicans can each make millions of paper corporations, and the votes of actual people will be irrelevant. It always started out simple, and needs to be returned to that way.... Here's roughly what it should be, though perhaps I defined citizen a little too narrowly...

1) "People" in the constitution refers only to citizens. The constitution shall not be construed as to confer any rights upon fictional or artificial entities or groups (nations, corporations, unions, etc...), nor upon non-citizens. Non-citizens (this might be unwise), corporations, nations, and groups would get their rights through treaties or laws, such as the Geneva Convention.

2) Citizenship cannot be stripped or given up except by mutual consent of the United States, and the citzen in question, in writing, witnessed by a court of competent jurisdiction, and only contingent upon the receipt of foreign citizenship. Nothing of value, other than another citizenship, may be offered in exchange for relinquishing US citizenship.

3) Citizens cannot be denied the right to vote for any reason whatsoever.

4) Those who are born in the US are automatically made citizens. (this is how it is now).

Something like that. Would clean up all sorts of little loopholes. For instance, a Deleware court's decision so many years ago that (in a blatant act of Judicial Activism) gave corporations the rights of "people". In addition to the "Lock up as many black and poor people as possible, and then we can prevent them from voting us out of power after they get out..." and "declare them terrorists so we can strip their citizenship and we don't have to treat them like humans or let them vote..." angles.

Bullshit. Free speech is an individual right. If those individuals speak as a group, the individuals are protected, not the group. The assertion you made is a gambit on the part of companies like Nike to repeal truth in advertising laws.

Don't fall into the rhetorical trap people (although some of you have made very excellent points dancing around the issue slightly).

Corporations are not only not individuals, they are also not even groups! Corporations are legally created entities to themselves that are given certain fictional legal rights to operate AS IF they were a person. Yes, coincidently, most corporations are run by groups of people - none of whom are the corporation itself. In fact, that's the point of it for most people: limited liability through a fictitious front called a corporation.

You see, individuals have rights to free speech. Individuals even have the right to lie - not to perjury, but common lying is perfectly reasonable and protected behavior.

Corporations by contrast can be regulated even to the point of destruction because they are legal fictions in the first place. They have no such right to free speech. They have no right to lie. They don't even have a right to exist unless we as a people allow them to exist.

A tidal wave of well funded speech will drown out the ripples of individual and not so well funded speech.

What you're saying is that the public is too stupid to find out the best candidate to vote for and vote for him or her; that the public needs to have billions of dollars spent shoving campaign ads in their faces.

Perhaps you're right, but if you are it really doesn't matter whether or not corporations can donate to politicians, we're screwed anyway.

It may use the term, and call for the software source to be viewable by the public after being submitted to the "Commission", but it is certainly not "open source" as we normally use that phrase. Open source programmers aren't usually subject to background checks. And I assume they mean for this last clause here to mean the compiled binaries, but by its strict language, they'll have to print the source code in newspapers, because it can't be transferred over the internet.

As for paper ballots, the idea is good, but will it really work well in practice? The machines will have to be able to void individual paper ballots if the voter, looking through the viewplate, realizes he didn't vote the right way. All this paper handling adds a lot of mechanical complexity to the machine, making breakdowns more likely.

Here's the text of the bill calling for programmers to have background checks (p. 10):

''(i) The manufacturer shall conduct
background checks on individuals who are
programmers and developers before such
individuals work on any software used in
connection with the voting system.

''(ii) The manufacturer shall document the chain of custody for the handling
of software used in connection with voting
systems.

''(iii) The manufacturer shall ensure
that any software used in connection with
the voting system is not transferred over
the Internet.

Increased risk of a machine breakdown is worth it compared to increased risk of widespread vote tampering via a single SQL command!

Of course, the background check part is a bit dumb -- they should have people audit the code, and run background checks on them. And I hope they mean they just can't tranfer the final copy of the code over the internet; with GPG the internet should be secure (and if it's not, they could just ask the NSA for some help).

Excellent point, but somehow I imagine that interstellar sized loophole will be fixed in committee. Too many lawyers to not get it fixed. How of course, may not be the way we'd like if past history is consulted...

If not, then we go back to paper ballots, which I voted on the last 3 elections here. I don't know if the early voters (because they are going to be out of town on ballot day) are still using the one machine the courthouse has or not. I had to use it a couple of years ago, and raised all kinds

The public interest is for a hand-counted vote, observed by all the candidates and other independent members of the public, which in other countries is typically completed well within 24 hours of the polls closing.

Any kind of mechanised vote counting whatsoever serves to hide the vote counting process from the electorate. Receipts are a red herring; they are the only way to verify the electronic count and, as a result, render the electronic count completely redundant.

The only reason corporations have power is that they have lots of money. The only reason lots of money is important is that a trained monkey with lots of money will win over Abe Lincoln with a stack of fliers in the back of a Honda Insight.

Now, if you had a well-informed populous with sharp critical-thinking skills this wouldn't be the case. But that's not what we have and it isn't.

So, the only way to get corporations out of politics is to teach children how to reason. Good luck.

The clinton administration was *disabled* by the lewinsky scandal which was BULLSHIT. Bush has done 40 things worse then lewinsky, but hmmmm, reps put a sunset provision in the independant council bill that expired if they took over the presidency... how could that be!?

I'll agree with you, that Bush won the war. But he has lost the peace. If you take a look at the world at present:

Afganistan: Outside Kandahar mostly ruled by loal warlords, whose loyality is really doubtfull. Law and order has not been restored in Afganistan after the fall of the Taliban rule

Iraq: Daily reports of wounded or killed American soldiers, especially since the official war ended. An undisclosed, but very high, number of civilian casualities. Some humanitarian organisations estimates this to be over 100.000 individuals.

Rest of the world: More people hates the USA than before Bush took office. In many parts of the world, the us is no longer seen as the leader of the free world or the big idol, to whom other countries can look up to. This is especially true among the closest allies of the United States, such as Germany and France. For instance, Germany has been a very close ally to the US in more than 50 years, and has followed the US through thick and thin. Now the Germans put the foot down, but the US isn't listening.

Please don't forget that the attacks on the US was motivated by hate to the US. How can one claim to create a more secure world, if one is only stirring up more and more hatred ??

And to all the military-centric folks: No, a great big military doesn't help, because you are not fighting an organized army.

So no, I'm not in the opinion, that Bush has done a very good job while in office.

Bush has cut corporate and high-income taxes, weakened legislation that protected the environment, patients' and consumers' rights, and tried to push an amendment banning gay marriage (which I don't oppose). He may have spent more than Clinton ever did, but Clinton also managed to pay the bills off, Bush is letting them collect into the trillions, which will badly hurt the US economy in the long-run.

Bush has been right in the war on terror? Is this a troll? He blocked the formation of the 9/11 commission, then stalled for months, refusing to create the national intelligence chief position until after the election. His administration rounded up over 3000 Muslims and denied them access to lawyers. He took the advice of Israeli hardliners and refused to negotiate with the Palestinian authority. (Palestinian oppression was one of Bin Laden's main stated reasons he declared war on America, if you remember. Letting the situation over there fester doesn't help, and waiting for Arafat to die could have taken forever.) He invaded Iraq on the faulty premise of WMDs, making our allies turn away from us. His administration (who he has promoted since), ignored international treaties and conventions, legalized torture and created Camp X-Ray and Camp Delta, which has not-so-secretly tortured detainees. The Abu Ghraib scandal really ruined the "War on Terror" as now no Muslim country supports America. What are Bush's plans to fix the situation? He claims there is no problem, as he was re-elected, and is threatening Syria and Iran. NATO isn't going to contribute any troops to stabilize Iraq, and neither will any country in the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, casualties mount in Iraq but the administration isn't saying what it will do, and recently pushed through a cut of veteran's benefits.

Chavez is a stalinist? Who did he kill, even after the failed coup attempt on him? Where are his forced labor camps and starving masses? Chavez doesn't appear to be anything like that, as far as I can see. Ever see "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised? [everything2.com]"

(From the Democratic Socialist website)
As the Socialist Party's standard-bearer twelve years later, [Eugene Debs] won nearly a million votes, some 6 percent of the total. In some states, such as Oklahoma, Washington, and California, the Socialist share of the vote climbed into the double digits. Over the same twelve-year period, the Socialist Party expanded its membership from 10,000 to nearly 120,000. Twelve hundred of these Socialists were elected to public office acros

Indeed, an example where an actual communist party was elected (if you people out there think that Stalin represented actual marxism/communism, then I'm not sure I can break through that ignorance) and was deposed by forces quite decidedly undemocratic. (Anyone sketchy on the facts can brush up on them somplace like wikipedia [wikipedia.org]). The sad truth is, the factions and people that believed in Communism as an actual expression of what is best for the people, well, they were often put down by heavy-handed measures on the parts of their opponents. The ones that espoused the ideology but really were just in it for power, those were the successful ones (and when they weren't, afterwards they were taken care of by those that were; Trotsky actually believed in what the Soviets claimed to, but Stalin, in it only for himself and unencumbered by any ideology otherwise, easily ousted Trotsky).

Note, also, the times that communists have been cheated out of elections; in the Weimar Republic in germany, near the end, both the Nazis and the Communists were making significant gains in the elections. The Nazis spread fear about the Communists, burned down the Reichtag building and blamed it on communists, and just generally used underhanded methods to manipulate people into handing power over to them.

And sometimes communists (or movements that started out as communist, but later became just power hungry regimes, a common story with revolutions in general, the French Revolution being a shining example of good intentions gone bad) had no option of democratic elections, because there were none in the country in question. So the fact that few communists have been elected worldwide is not that much of a strike against them; the number of examples when fundamentally different systems were elected to power are few as is, it's hardly a show of superiority when the status quo is re-asserted.

Although, to go to the literal wording of the grandparent: name a communist that was elected in a real election. Well, that isn't very hard at all, there are even communists elected at this very moment around the world, maybe not as the ruling governments, but if you're looking just at communists that have been elected in real elections you don't have to look very far. I searched for about half a second and already came up with some evidence [dw-world.de] of communist activity and success in the democratic process.

Methinks the grandparent is perhaps a tad irrationally biased, to make such blanket statements.

> Again, go ahead and argue with me if you want; I won't even bother reading it.

And we have to endure reading you? You see this is one of those things that bothers me about the debates these days. Instead of trying to find a compromise we are in a screaming match on who can scream loudest WITHOUT listening to the other person.

So here I go rambling with my own off-topic ideas....

There is a public interest, and often some people represent the public interest. So the original poster is probably not th

This is an area where reasonable people of all political persuasions ought to be able to come to an agreement. Based on your comment, I'm guessing that you're a conservative and I'd probably disagree with at least three-quarters of your beliefs -- but the one thing we can almost certainly agree on is that every eligible voter who wants to vote should be able to do so in a way that guarantees that vote is counted. We may argue all day about policy, but the mechanisms by which that policy is created and enacted must be trustworthy if that policy is to be anything more than the whim of a few autocrats.

So, what Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Greens, independents, and, hell, I don't know, Prohibitionists and Natural Law believers all ought to ask themselves is: if anyone, of any party or stripe, opposes this -- what possible reason can they have for such opposition; or whether, what reason that does not mark them as irredeemably evil?

Actually, paper receipts are the heart of integrity. They provide the doublechecks to the electronic record, and when the typical contested election degenerates into "we counted x", "no, we counted y", the paper ballots can be trotted out and physically counted by everyone. And these paper records (probably printed on thermal tape) will be sealed inside the machine. Nobody should be able to tamper with them, and there shouldn't be big discussions about hanging chads or pregnant punches.

Strangely enough, Open Source voting code is far less important to me than the paper ballots themselves. Code correctness is only a small piece of security. First, I personally have no way of seeing into these voting machines to validate that they're running the code they say they're running. Sure, you can show me a printout of "OSVote2008.cpp", but what does that prove? It proves exactly that you have a piece of paper with code on it. It does NOT prove that's the code running inside the machine.

Or what if it is? What if I have totally trusted, verifiable code running in the typical Windows machine? What's to prevent a virus or other piece of malware inside from hijacking that code and switching enough votes from one candidate to the other to help throw the election?

Code isn't the answer. Physical tokens (in this case paper records) backed by judges performing spot checks, is ultimately the only trustable way to count an election.

Because it's new technology, we get to pass laws regarding its usage. You don't have to have a 100% hand-recount to be sure the voting machines haven't been tampered with. Recounting a RANDOM SAMPLING of a small fraction of the precincts would be enough to statistically ensure that the voting machines hadn't been tampered with.

Of course, that turns into a different crypto-related problem: who determines which precincts get recounted? Coin flips? Rolled dice? Lottery style ping-pong balls? A poorly-

A programmer demonstrated how to rig votes on machines in Florida. Washington, Indiana and Florida at least had problems with their voting machines. I seem to recall several machines lost a shitload of votes when they were asked to hold more ballots than they could. You see no value in paper receipts?

...scarily like a good idea. It'll be interesting to see how far this can get, and how long before the inevitable corportate opposition to this begins to mount. I can already see Diebold rallying their forces...

Two TWO YEAR OLD BILLS that have already been introduced in the House and Senate would do JUST THIS, namely, require permanent, voter verified receipts and open source all code on e-voting machines. See my post here [slashdot.org].

Also, Diebold already has the capability to add paper receipts, WHICH WERE NOT REQUIRED UNDER HAVA, to all of its e-voting deployments. They're just a contractor. They'll build and deploy whatever local governments will buy. But if you're one of those people who thinks that Diebold, a multi-thousand person corporation that prides itself on reliable customer interface systems, is literally conspiring to rig US elections on the basis of offhanded campaign quotes in the context of GOP fundraising by Diebold's CEO, however inappropriate they were, then I suppose none of what I just said will matter to you.

...The Count Every Vote Act of 2005 will provide a voter verified paper ballot for every vote cast in electronic voting machines and ensures access to voter verification for all citizens, including language minority voters, illiterate voters and voters with disabilities. The bill mandates that this ballot be the official ballot for purposes of a recount.

Why should the manual count paper of paper ballots be the official recount. Why would there be a recount of a machine tabulated vote? Does someone think the machine miscounted? And why why why do people keep thinking that a hand count done by humans would be more accurate than a machine count?

Florida was definitely crazy -- but for me, I thought that once it was in the hands of the "counters" it was now a matter of who THEY wanted to win. The fact that they *could* block or approve a ballot meant that we were now suffering at the impartiality of people. And I don't trust the impartiality of people. At least with an open source machine, the code and the machine can be examined for proof of it's impartiality.

What's to prevent one counter from blocking/approving ballots according to personal pr

Did you miss the stories about the machines that lost votes? If there had been a paper ballot printed by the machine there would have been no data loss.

Never mind the "Do we trust diebold" conspiracy theories however (in)valid they may be, the voter should have a right to see that their ballot was cast as the intended it to be. Unless you've got some cool superman xray vision or mad van Eck phreaking powers you can't tell what the machine is recording as your vote.

When you're working with a computer, you don't necessarily get the results you want. You get the results the programmer wanted you to have.

I can write one or two lines of code that would screw up vote counts in any number of ways- adding two votes to the vote count instead of adding one, switching the vote counts at the end, or any of numerous other ways.

"Paper records of electronic voting:" Good, as long as voters can't prove to somebody else who they voted for. That would facilitate vote buying.

"Election-day registration": Need to read the bill. If volounteer (partisan) groups get to haphazardly register people at the polls, that's a bad thing. Registrations should be in order some weeks before the elections.

"Election Day as a national holiday.": Good. Productivity could go down, but it could increase turn-out and the importance of the election in people's minds.

"Restoration of voting rights for former felons": Not sure. Is a felon that has served its sentence entitled to the same rights as others?

"the source and object code of all electronic voting machines to be open and readable by the public." Definately good. The many-eyeballs approach to security validation is perfect for this case, since it's an application with such a huge number of interested parties.

Now, how about non-citizens voting and proof of identification? Anything on that?

"Restoration of voting rights for former felons": Not sure. Is a felon that has served its sentence entitled to the same rights as others?

A felon that has served his/her punishment, in the form of a sentence, should no longer be considered to have a societal debt. Otherwise, the person is still being punished long after the expiry of the sanction.

If a person can expect to be punished for the rest of their lives, regardless of the declared sentence length, then there is little reason for that individual

Is a felon that has served its sentence entitled to the same rights as others?

I am a felon, technically. I was convicted of a crime I never commited, because I couldn't afford a lawyer and legal aid was turned down because I have a job. I served a year in jail because some drunk woman claimed I beat her. She later recanted (the police assumed she was threatened to do so), and didn't show up at the trial, but it was enough to convict me.

"Restoration of voting rights for former felons": Not sure. Is a felon that has served its sentence entitled to the same rights as others?

If someone has served their sentence then they have "payed thier debt to society", so why shouldn't they be able to vote? It seems to me that allowing ex-cons to fully participate in society would help rehabilitate them. (Though I have nothing other than my gut feeling to back that up.) Disallowing them from ever voting again would seem to send a message that they are no

"Restoration of voting rights for former felons": Not sure. Is a felon that has served its sentence entitled to the same rights as others?

How can you now be sure? What part of the Constitution says the goverment can even take away one's right to vote? The 15th amendment states that "The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof".

So either felons are not people or states are already in violation of the constitution by denying them the right to vote at least for the senate (even while in prison). And what is the problem with felons voting anyway? Maybe they'll vote for people that will repeal the laws that convicted them? For example, maybe the mass of people convicted on drug offenses will vote to end the drug war? Awesome... the drug war is stupid.

The prison population shouldn't ever be so large that they should really affect the vote anyway. And if felons are ever are that large of a group then God help us all if they can't vote.

I don't have the lawbooks in front of me, but aren't there some places in which exceeding the speed limit by more than 15 m.p.h. is legally considered a felony? The liberal in me says that even if you kill someone, you should still be able to pick the leader of the country. The main argument I can see there is that violent felons won't "think right," to which I ask: what about those who are mentally handicapped?

"Election Day as a national holiday.": Good. Productivity could go down, but it could increase turn-out and the importance of the election in people's minds.

How about doing the presidential election on a sunday? Most people don't have to work on sundays, so productivity loss would not be a problem. In Germany (and most of the EU, I think), all elections are on sundays.

Felons are still citizens. Even when in jail. citizens have a right to vote.

Those citizens who are felons serving a sentence generally don't have the right to vote. The prison guards have a right to vote though. You're only making sense if you were referring to them. (The guards are in the jail, but they aren't felons.)

Now the military on the otherhand, they are government property (G.I.) so it would make more sense for them not to be able to vote while serving.

the only real problem with last years election is that for most of/.ers, the wrong guy won. the us civil rights commission did two exhaustive studies of florida. guess what? nothing. no fraud, no intimidation, no disenfranchisement. sorry go home. the press did a thorough recount of the ballots. every scenario. guess what. bush still wins. if you want the links, i'll find them, but we're finding voter reg. fraud in ohio, but oops, they'er democratic. and washington state. please. dead people voting, "discovered" ballots, 500 people registered at the same address. recounts until the democrat wins.

i'm honestly taking sides, because i think there's going to be an amount of chicanery on both sides. but if this is your kool-aid, and you focus on voting problems, a system which has served us for 200 years, then you're living in la la land. the 1960 election was won by fraud. nixon didn't run around the country for years claiming he was robbed, etc. if you're unhappy, how about volunteering next time, as the democrats had to pay campaign workers, while the republicans had 1 million volunteers. oh, and lastly, if you're hanging out at kos, oh nevermind...

What are you talking about? Touchscreen systems coupled to black-box counters have not been around for 200 years, and we will never know who won in any district where they were used. It's not like we weren't saying this before the election either. We can't ever prove the election was stolen, but you'll never prove it wasn't either.

Either the election was stolen or it wasn't. Seems that if you cannot prove that it was stolen, it must not have been stolen.

Others have been having fun extending your logic, and I certainly don't want to be left out:

Either you'll die in Texas or you won't. Seems that if you cannot prove you'll die in Texas, you won't die in Texas. So get yourself to Texas right now!

Either your wife is pregnant with a girl or a boy. Seems that if you cannot prove she's carrying a boy, you must not be having a boy. So paint the bedroom pink.

But unlike dying in Texas or having a girl instead of a boy, there's a burden of proof involved here. And you've got it ass-backwards. The burden of proof rests on the state, not the voter. It's not my responsibility to make sure that the machine I vote on isn't stealing my vote. The state bears a fiduciary responsibility to guarantee auditability and transparency to the voter. They must be able to prove to us that our votes were accurately counted. If they cannot prove that the election wasn't stolen, it must be presumed to be stolen, even if we conversely cannot prove that it actually was. The burden of proof is on them, not us.

They failed at this wherever they introduced Diebold vote counting machines. They had plenty of time to prepare, they had our tax dollars, what did they do with it? They bought pretty black boxes that made voting "fun" even as they removed the auditability of the voting process. Now they can't prove the election wasn't stolen in those districts. Oops. And this will happen again, and again, in future elections, including ones whose outcomes you may not like.

It's related to the notion of a conflict of interest. The appearance of a conflict of interest is ethically considered to be a conflict of interest. If you're an FDA commissioner, for example, the burden of proof rests on you to prove that your second job at Novartis won't affect your objectivity when approving their pharmaceuticals. If you can't prove it, then the appearance of a conflict of interest remains, which means you've got a conflict of interest and should step down. It's not our job as consumers of FDA-approved drugs to prove that your heart isn't pure and to be on guard whenever we swallow a pill. We pay taxes so that we don't have to worry about that.

(Merely disclosing your conflict of interest as you take a position- yoo hoo everyone, by the way I may have a conflict of interest in this job I'm about to take- has become fashionable in the past, oh say, four years, but it's not ethical- you shouldn't be accepting a position at all if it places you in a situation where you even appear to have a conflict of interest.)

if you're unhappy, how about volunteering next time, as the democrats had to pay campaign workers, while the republicans had 1 million volunteers.

Come on, who mods stupid crap like this up to 5?

1. That volunteer estimate sounds awfully high, and "1 million" sounds like the sort of number someone would just pull out of their ass2. No, the republicans are not the only ones who have volunteers3. No, the democrats are not the only ones who pay campaign workers

This bill (The Count Every Vote Act of 2005) corrects many of the problems in the last election...

As much as I'd like to believe it was a conspiracy that cost us the election, I just see too many redneck wackos with their gun racks and SUVs and 'W the president' stickers to believe that there isn't a very large portion of this country that willingly supports devolving back to the horse and buggy age as quickly as possible.

You need to make a choice and priorities when your views are like that. You cannot name one candidate who could have gotten enough electoral votes to win the president in the last election who agreed with that guy on all points. And he just gave a short list (though it covered most of the really controversial issues), consider a list that coveres everything.

If Pro-War and Anti-racist-preferences get higher marks, than the rest you are pro Bush. (Though Kerry might be pro war, it was hard to tell earl

Blame Reagan for the broken Social Security system, since he's the guy that raised the amount taken out of your paycheck to 15% (capped for the wealthy of course). Not only that, blame him and every president since then for loaning the additional $200-300 billion dollars generated by this to the government to be spent elsewhere. Finally, if Bush 43 has his way, you'll be able to blame him for dumping all that extra money into the overvalued stock market. Incidentally, that is just before the baby boomers

The purpose of this bill is not to improve the voting process - the same ideas have been proposed before. The purpose of this bill is to help Democrats get to the polls on election day. Here's how:

Forces states to allow ex-felons to vote. In states where felons are allowed to vote, votes can favor Democrats 10:1. Yes, this means states will be forced to allow murderers, rapists, and molesters who have completed parole the opportunity to help select who represents your community. Shouldn't states be allowed to decide this for themselves? And why is it Democrats are so worried about voting rights for ex-cons, anyway? Are Democrats the party of felons ?

Make Voting Day a federal holiday. This means all the people who work for the federal, state, and local governments will have higher turnout, as they will have the day off. Guess which way these people vote? People who don't work for the govt won't have the day off.

The bill states "failure to provide information concerning citizenship or age" or "a social security number or driver's license number" is not considered a "material omission" that would bar people from voting. All you have to do is sign an affadavit at the poll, on election day. This will allow anyone - anyone at all - to vote. The only chance of having the vote disallowed is in the event of a recount, when the paperwork is checked.

Your line of argument is deeply flawed. The fact that the bill would help the democrats is irrelevent*. It's ad hominem. The bill must be evaluated on the merits of its argument alone.

I disagree that forcing states to standardize their handling of ex-felons is a bad thing. The vast lack of uniformity in the voting process between states is an abhorance. National elections should be held to a national standards. Whether that means allowing all ex-cons to vote, or preventing all ex-cons from voting is a sepe

1. I'm pretty sure the constitution gives the power of deciding who gets to vote to the states. So while you might think for national elections it should be decided at a federal level it should take an amendment to change it.2. I think if the bill is presented by two democrats and it can be demonstrated resonably that the bill will give a significant advantage to democratic voters then it is an important thing to consider and is not ad hominem.3. You seem to be saying ex-con voting rights should be hand

The bill stinks of having been written by lawyers with no worthwhile input from software people. The buzzwords are there, but the end product is incoherent.

If the code is open to inspection, there is no need for the background checks. That's just a way of inadvertently preventing the best people from working on the code. Any attempt to license coders sets a disastrous precendent in any event and should be rejected outright.

"Chain of custody" for code is bullshit; this isn't the pharmaceutical industry. What's really needed is verification that the binary is derived from the published source. The correct way to do that is to fully specify the development environment and configuration that generated the code. Then anyone else can reproduce it.

The other thing that's needed is a means of verifying that the binary loaded onto the machine is the one generated from the code using the specified development environment. SHA512 (or whatever) hashes can help with this, as can digital signatures. The "can't transfer over the Internet" requirement is inane and seems to be there only because of ignorance about methods of verifying integrity, regardless of how the file gets transferred. Think they've ever heard of VPNs? Do they think there's a risk in using them?

I agree with a number of the goals of this bill. But it kind of depresses me what a dog's breakfast they have produced.

Write up a legislative proposal in which most everything sounds good and simple, honest and true. Bury a couple of things in it which are clear attempts at tweaking election results in the favor of the Democrats.

The real key issues here are the election-day registration, and the votes for felons.

Election-day registration is, to me, a nightmare of an idea. Without any undeniable proof of citizenship or way to enforce one and only one vote per person, I can envision buses full of illegal aliens being sent from one precinct to another, adding votes for whatever party is paying them. Over the top? Ridiculous? Perhaps... but then, who would have thought we'd have had a local party rep paying people (WITH COCAINE) to fill out batches of bogus voting registration forms? That happened in Ohio in 2004.

Votes for felons? Well, the current law says they don't have the right to vote. Whether or not that's the right thing to do is certainly debatable. But it's clearly an attempt to generate votes for Democrats -- statistics show that a large majority of felons would likely vote that way.

If Republicans back the bill, they're giving Democrats a potential (and depending on your views, perhaps unfair) advantage in the next elections. If they don't, the Democrats will make the cry "They're against honest votes!" to the media. Repubs are kinda stuck, since they have no way of doing line-item votes.

Now... if a politician actually wanted to FIX the system, instead of twist it to their personal favor, we'd resolve the issue of proving citizenship and voting only once. The first is hard, since the US doesn't really have "citizenship papers" like most other countries. The ink-on-the-thumb solution used by the Afghans and Iraqis seemed a pretty simple solution for the second one.

In particular, the bill restricts the ability of chief state election officials as well as owners and senior managers of voting machine manufacturers to engage in certain kinds of political activity.

This is new. It addresses Diebold's famous conflict of interest.

The bill also makes it a federal crime to commit deceptive practices, such as sending flyers into minority neighborhoods telling voters the wrong voting date, and makes these practices a felony punishable by up to a year of imprisonment.

Another widely-reported concern. The Republican majority will never let this pass.

Another widely-reported concern. The Republican majority will never let this pass.

Your implication being that this is what the Republicans do, can you offer any actual proof that this occured in the last election?

Democrats were signing up dead people to vote, and there was actual proof of it. I'm tired of the vague, unproven claims being thrown around. And while it comes from both sides, I sure see it a lot more from conspiracy-laden mindsets on the left side of the fence.

"The Repbulican majority will never let this pass"? What are you smoking? Did no Democrats in Illinois (or my own home state of Louisiana for that matter) ever steal elections? Do no Democrats use dirty tricks in primary campaigns?

Instead of your clever little signature, why don't you use some facts to back up an outlandish statement like that?

The putative reasoning for going with electronic systems was likely that since we have managed to design accountable and reliable electronic and computing equipment for the management of our power, medical care, money, etc., it likely was more or less assumed by the legislature that such accountable systems could also be applied to voting.

That reasoning is flawed, as Bruce Schneier explains here [schneier.com]:

Some have argued in favor of touch-screen voting systems, citing the millions of dollars that are handled every day by ATMs and other computerized financial systems. That argument ignores another vital characteristic of voting systems: anonymity. Computerized financial systems get most of their security from audit. If a problem is suspected, auditors can go back through the records of the system and figure out what happened. And if the problem turns out to be real, the transaction can be unwound and fixed. Because elections are anonymous, that kind of security just isn't possible.

This sounds like it is going to give the appearance of voter verification of the software, without doing so in substance. I can just see me sitting down to a hundred thousand line listing of a voting machine program, and trying to look for backdoors or subtle miscounting tricks. The code needs to be available in machine readable form so we can add internal checks and logs and then run it in a test environment.

S.330 [loc.gov] and H.R.704 [loc.gov]/H.R.550 [loc.gov] are new versions of the same bills I previously discussed, introduced under the same title (with a new year) on February 9, 2005. The Senate version already has 9 cosponsors, and the House version 102.

[1] In fairness, this bill does have a couple of minor differences: it proposes that election day be a federal holiday, and

makes doing things that liberals would like to make people believe are routine and widespread, like intimidating minorities and passing out fliers with incorrect voting dates, a felony. It also prohibits executives at voting vendors from being politically active, likely to pander to the people who think Diebold's CEO stole the election for Bush, completely ignoring the impossibility of

why is the program any more complicated than just storing a hash table of votes that occurred? It just seems like a really simple app, I don't get how there can be so many problems with it.

Lots of programs would be trivial to implement if everyone in the world just behaved themselves at all times. Almost all of the parties involved have an incredibly strong incentive to mess with the hashtable. And it has to be completely auditable, so you can see exactly what changes were made to the hashtable and when,

I, for one, am extraordinarily disappointed with the lack of quality of trolls in this modern day and age. I remember when a decent troll [adequacy.org] would satisfy my cravings for ignorance. But recently, the quantity of good trolls has been steadily decreasing.

Is someone dumping raw sewage over the side of your bridge? Come one people, you have to _make an effort_